Saturday, January 12, 2008

1975: Chuck Out Your Flares!

I find the way that the 1970s have been rewritten during the last ten-to-fifteen years very amusing. Many of the things we attributed to the '60s in the '70s and beyond are now celebrated as "'70s innovations" and the 1980s are also raided for pop culture and fashion to call "'70s".

Reliving the '70s through the newspapers of the decade brings back many memories of just how grim and stagnant the decade really was style-wise. Flared trousers, the hippie uniform of the late 1960s, had begun to enter the mainstream before that decade ended, but in the '70s, in the absence of new ideas, flares got rather stuck.

Even though I was only a kid, flares were a grim, militant uniform for me and my peer group and the same was true of teenagers on the council estate where I lived. You wore them or got picked on. There was nothing hippie or "loving" about the trend. And they lingered on and on.

'70s fashion designers did seek to shake off the outdated '60s fashions. They never quite managed it, but they did try. And in this article from the Sunday People, November 23, 1975, we see an attempt to call "time" on flares and revive drainpipe trousers:

FLARED - BOTTOMEDFrom now on, trousers are straight-legged, even drainpipe slim. If you have flared trousers too good to throw away, it's worth a try to narrow the bottoms and wear them rolled up to just below the calf.

Of course, people had neither the time or money to step out of flares immediately. But it's good to see from actual material of the time that the tide was turning. It is also highly instructive to those writers, Wikipedia types, TV people and fashion reviewers who try to pretend that the '60s happened in the '70s and that the '70s were a great era for fashion.

They were not. The advent of both flares and psychedelic clothing took place in the mid-to-late 1960s and the so-called Summer of Love was in 1967/68.

To all those who pretend otherwise - haven't you got lives? Is rewriting the past a good thing? Does it give your lives in the present day some sense of meaning? Does it make you feel good about yourselves? Don't you think it makes you look rather silly?

Because anybody who takes a few minutes to study the facts can see you're writing/talking a load of nonsense.

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INTRODUCTION

This is one of a series of three blogs - the other two cover the 1960s (Spacehopper), and the 1980s ('80s Actual).

After all the '70s hype of the last ten years or so, this is a chance to relive the decade as it really was in England, through newspaper and magazine clippings and memories.

This is the REAL 1970s, not the BBC or Wikipedia's versions, which hype the decade to death and bolster it up with 1960s and 1980s pop culture.

The '70s were often grim, far slower moving than today, and saw the '60s hippie spell rapidly fading to be replaced by economic gloom and a glut of anger - which manifested itself in the Punk era.

It's the decade where we liked the Wombles, chucked frisbees, watched Upstairs, Downstairs and Starsky & Hutch, and witnessed the gloriously tacky but hugely danceable rise of a type of music called "Disco" - a new soundtrack for the discotheques, which had been established before the decade began. With its rich influences, including Soul and Pop, Disco was a wow. Though not with everybody.

Very few people had a video recorder (only 5% of UK households had one by 1980), there were no mobile phones, and although colour TV had been around in this country since 1967, they didn't come cheap and many of us poorer folk stuck to black and white.

Tristram of George & Mildred got "Pong" at Christmas 1979, but nobody I knew had a TV games system, which became available, at a price, late in the decade.

Many of us were dirt poor, inflation rocketed, in 1979 interest rates soared to 17% - the highest since records began in 1694, decimalisation (the coins were designed in the late '60s ready for "D" day in 1971) was controversial - was it bumping up prices? - and the Queen's Silver Jubilee Day saw the Sex Pistols in the pop charts with a song which certainly did not express loyal greetings...

Come back to the REAL 1970s, no rosy coloured specs, no rewriting of the decade to include pop culture belonging to the '60s or '80s, but as clear a view as I can possibly give of the decade!

This blog is largely based on English magazine and newspaper clippings and my memories, but I hope that it will also be useful and enjoyable to those living in the other UK nations - and much further afield.